It is the time of year to catch up with old friends, preferably by a roaring fire and with a glass of vino in hand. Circumstances have kept Bonnie and myself from each others company for the past couple of months, so what better time to catch up and make new plans than in that dead zone between Christmas and the New Year.

It was half way through the second bottle of wine that Bonnie confided in me a very strange experience she had recently.

One day in late November, Bonnie had visited a local museum: Beamish. A large open air site dedicated to the Mining Heritage of the North East, and containing entire buildings and streets transported brick by brick and painstakingly reconstructed on the 300 acre site. After wandering around the homely Edwardian Terraces and the cosy pit cottages with their market gardens, and taken a ride or two on the tram cars, Bonnie found her footsteps leading her towards one of the more remote parts of Beamish: Pockerley Old Hall.

Pockerley Old Hall, tucked away in the treeline. Image by Lenora.

The Old Hall sits nestled amidst a dark copse of trees and is set very much apart from the quaint little town – with all of its touristy hustle and bustle and jolly Edwardian re-enactors. The hall has a remote, older feel to it, emphasised by its situation overlooking the empty shell of a church and the old railway line below it; if you look carefully further down the line you can even see a macabre old gibbet standing amongst the trees.

Unlike most of the other buildings at Beamish, Pockerley Old Hall has always been there – it is mentioned in records dating back to the twelfth century and the existing building has solid defensive sections dating back to the mid fifteenth century, while the plain but elegant farm-house was built in the 1700’s.

Bonnie explained that she was exploring the cramped and low ceilinged chambers of the old hall, milling around with other visitors, when she came to an upstairs room in which the farmer would have lived. Finding the room stifling and unpleasant, she said that she turned towards the window that looked out over the grounds in order to get some air. By the window was an old desk, and nothing more of note.

Upper window at Pockerley Old Hall, image by Lenora

Suddenly, from the area of the desk a figure of a woman emerged, where no woman had been moments before. Bonnie said she was immediately frozen to the spot by the inexplicable occurence. There was no door or stairwell from which the woman could have appeared, and no possible explanation for her sudden materialization. Bonnie described the figure as being just under 5 foot tall, clad in black, with a long skirt, jacket and shawl, and a hat with a veil – she thought the figure looked like a woman in mourning. She was able to stare through the veil and into the apparitions eyes, and recollects the face of a middle-aged woman staring back at, or perhaps through, her.

Insidious, 2010, Dir James Wan

So solidly did the woman appear that Bonnie explained it seemed that she was blocking her way, and it was only when the figure melted back into the area near the desk that Bonnie was able to pull herself away and leave the chamber.

I asked her how the experience made her feel, how did she ‘know’ the woman wasn’t ‘real’ and she said that she was gripped by a sense of fear, so much so that her heart was racing and she was shaking. When I asked her if she was alone when this happened, she said, no. Other people were in the room, yet nobody else saw the woman. Bonnie explained that she had to get out of the hall immediately and could not be persuaded to re-enter to ask the curator if there was any explanation of this apparition. (This is not the first odd experience that Bonnie has had, she had a similar unusual encounter when we visited the notoriously haunted Chambercombe Manor in Devon a few years ago.)

I have done a little research and although Beamish does have some hauntings associated with it, none seem to exactly fit this pattern. The closest that I could find related to the Grey Lady of Starling Bridge (near Beamish Hall). She is supposed to have been the daughter of the owner of Pockerley Old Hall, who fell in love with the heir to Beamish Hall. Both families frowned upon the match as the girl was betrothed to another. The tale states that the unwilling bride fled to Beamish Hall on her wedding day and hid from her pursuers in a trunk in the cellar, where (in the best folk-tradition of brides in trunks) she perished, her body not being found for several months.

Her shade is supposed to haunt the bridge near the hall, waiting for her true love, and she has been sighted on several occasions in the past few years….perhaps the grim-faced middle-aged woman in mourning, that Bonnie met with, was the lost brides’ grieving mother….?

1825: the year in which porters at the Turf Hotel started to get a little nervous…..

In late Georgian Britain Newcastle was not only a burgeoning industrial and commercial centre but, before the advent of the railway, it was also one of the main staging posts for the London to Edinburgh coach.

The Turf Hotel was one of Newcastle’s most famous coaching inns. It once stood on Collingwood Street and it was one of the main drop off/pick up points for both people and goods travelling north and south. It also gained a certain infamy as the transport hub of the ghoulish trade in corpses destined for the anatomy schools in Scotland and London.

As with any busy transport hub, sometimes both people and parcels missed their connection. This was a particular problem at the weekend as coaches did not run on Sundays, so anybody missing the last coach on Saturday would have to wait until Monday to continue their journey.

On an ordinary Saturday in September 1825 a man deposited a large wooden chest at the booking office of the Turf, but for whatever reason, the chest missed the last coach and had to be stored at the booking office over the weekend. By Monday the porters were becoming anxious because of the foul smell and strange ooze emanating from the container. Police and a magistrate were called and the box opened. Inside was the body of a teenage girl, apparently dead of natural causes, and destined, it would seem, for the anatomists table in Edinburgh.

There were several other similar occurrences over the next few years, making the job of porter at the Turf Hotel one filled with unwelcome surprises. In 1828 a Mr James Aitcheson of Edinburgh was arrested for depositing a chest at the Turf that contained a body. He was later acquitted of any crime after claiming he had been an innocent dupe with no knowledge of the content of the box (this later proved to be a lie as a shop keeper recognised him as having bought wood from him to build the box in the first place!) however by that time, Mr A had absconded.

Eventually the porters became so fed up with having to investigate vile-smelling boxes containing nasty surprises that when a suspect package bound for Edinburgh arrived from York in November 1828, the porters simply refused to unpack it and sent it straight back to York. Unfortunately at York, the equally suspicious and squeamish porters also refused to unpack it and sent it trundling back up to Newcastle! The boxes peregrinations were eventually ended when, as local legend has it, the porters at the Turf solved the matter to their own satisfaction by throwing it into the River Tyne (lets hope it wasn’t just a student sending their dirty laundry home!).

Supply and Demand

18C anatomy lesson, image by Hogarth, public domain

So why the brisk trade in bodies? Well, in the early nineteenth century anatomy schools, which were at that time unlicensed, were springing up at an increasing rate: with famous schools in Edinburgh, Aberdeen, Glasgow and London. Advances in medical science required more and more subjects for the dissection tables but demand far outstripped supply.

In 1752 legislation stipulated that, as an additional ‘post mortem’ punishment, the bodies of hanged murderers could be handed over to the anatomists. By the early nineteenth century as few as 55 or so bodies per year became available to anatomy schools by this legitimate method [2]. In addition to this, because refrigeration had yet to be invented, schools had now way of storing corpses so were in constant need of fresh ones.

Bodysnatchers, resurrectionists, Sack ’em up men or Burkers sought to fill this gap and line their pockets (the going rate appears to have been about 4 guineas for an adult, and by length for children: 6 shillings for the first foot then 9 pence for every inch thereafter [3]). Although medical students were not averse to occasionally sourcing their own material, more often it was the criminal class, working hand in glove with the elite medical men of the day, who supplied the corpses that would used to train up the future eminent doctors and surgeons of the nineteenth century.

Body Snatching in Theory and Practice

Resurrection Men – by Thomas Rowlandson 1756 – 1827

So how did they go about their trade? Well there were a number of methods and preparation seems to have been paramount.

Resurrectionists or their wives would attend funerals in order to scout out the position of the corpse and any potential threats. They might even take up the spade and masquerade as grave diggers themselves.

Once a likely corpse had been identified the resurrectionist would return to the cemetery at night, having suitably bribed any low paid cemetery attendants to leave the gates open. If they had horses they would be shod in leather to deaden the hoofbeats, and they opened graves using wooden shovels to minimise noise.

Methods of extracting corpses could differ. One popular way was for the grave-digger/resurrectionist whilst out of sight at the bottom of the grave, to sack up the occupant, and as the grave filled with soil the coffin would remain 6ft under, whilst the bagged up corpse slowly rose towards the surface where it could be retrieved with minimum effort later.

By far the most common method appears to have been to dig straight down to the approximate position of the head of the corpse, cover the coffin end with cloth to deaden the noise, wrench it off, and sling a rope around the cadavers head and haul it to the surface.

One commonly quoted method, devious in the extreme, was for a patch of turf to be cut many feet from the target grave, a tunnel would then be dug to the coffin and a child or small adult would then open the end of the coffin and dragg the corpse back along the shaft where the turf would be replaced. The family would be none the wiser because the grave itself would be undisturbed. Ingenious as this method appears, Wilkins in his Fireside Book of Death, doubts its practical application: it would have been hard to correctly guess the level of the coffin and shore up the tunnel to avoid collapse.

Once the corpse was extracted the next thing to do was to remove any possessions such as jewelry, shroud etc in order to avoid being charged with a felony if caught. Oddly enough, corpses were not considered property so punishment was often only a fine or prison, whereas theft could lead to the gallows or transportation.

Then it was a simple matter to dress the corpse in an old coat, and stagger off into the night pretending they were ‘dead’ drunk, or pack them up into your gig for delivery to the nearest anatomy school in the morning. In fact, the presence of strangers at funerals in rural parishes, especially if they had a gig, was enough to lead to riots on occasion as gigs were inextricable linked to resurrectionists in the public imagination [4].

How to stay buried when you are dead

Now you might think that the resurrectionists had it all their own way, plundering graveyards, with minimal legal consequences and making a packet into the bargain. But fear of having your loved one’s grave desecrated by sack ’em up men lead to the general public taking some serious precautions to avoid ending up on the dissecting table. And if they caught a resurrectionist they would meet out their own kind of justice on him.

The very poor might only have recourse to arranging stones or shells on a grave in order to tell if it had been disturbed, but there were other more complex methods available (for a price). These methods are very often found in graveyards that are in close proximity to anatomy schools – I wonder why? Here are some of the most notable found in England, Scotland and the USA :

1. Watch-clubs and Watchtowers

Watchtower at Dalkeith Cemetery. Image via Wikimedia

The most basic precautions were railings around cemeteries and posting a guard on graves. Often loved ones would camp out for two or three weeks to guard a fresh burial. Once putrefaction had time to set in the corpse was no longer a viable commodity.

Watch-clubs were also formed, Glasgow watching society had 2000 members. To make things more comfortable for watchers, especially in winter, watch houses or watch towers were built. Some were quite impressive like the one at Dalkeith Cemetery, dating from 1827, near Edinburgh.

2.Mortstones and Mortsafes

Mortsafe at Logeriat Church. Image by Judy Willson via Wikimedia

The next sensible thing to do was to make it as difficult as possible for resurrectionists to get to your coffin. In Scotland stones and branches were added to grave fill to make digging harder, and mortstones were used. Mortstones were huge heavy slabs of stone placed over the grave to prevent disturbance. They could be rented out and reused.

The only drawback with mortstones was that resurrectionists soon learned to simply dig at the head of the stone to find the end of the coffin and thereby extract the corpse!

Mortsafes were a more sophisticated version of mortstones, heavy stone slabs with a complex wire cage structure about them. Placed over the coffin they effectively barred the way to resurrectionists. They too, could be rented out and reused again and again (so the body-snatchers were not the only ones making a profit here).

3. Coffin Collars

Coffin collar from Kingskettle Graveyard

In between mortstones and mortsafes come coffin collars. These simple but effective devices were a response to the fact that resurrectionists could easily pull corpses out of the end of a coffin despite the mort stone atop the grave. The metal collar was fixed around the neck of the corpse and then nailed to the bottom of the coffin.

4. Mort houses

The Morthouse Udny Green, image by Martin Gorman via Wikimedia

The rich have always had the edge on avoiding body-snatchers, they can afford burial inside churches, vaults, mausolea. Not so the poor, not until mort houses were conceived. Often set up by public subscription bodies could remain in the locked and secure mort house until they decayed and then be buried in the grave yard.

Udny Green mort house in Aberdeenshire is a circular fortress of decay uniquely designed with a turntable. A body was added, the turntable moved, and another was added, by the time the original body was at the opening again it was sufficiently decayed to be taken out for burial in the graveyard. Unfortunately, Udny Green was built in 1832 the year the Anatomy Act came into force so it was almost immediately obsolete.

5. Cemetery Guns and Coffin Torpedoes

Mr P Clover’s Patented Coffin Torpedo

Cemetery Guns have a long history and were used in Britain until they were finally outlawed in 1827. Mr Clementshaw designed a bell mouthed flintlock complete with trip wires that could defend a cemetery at night, and be unloaded and made safe when the sexton returned in the morning. Needless to say there were accidental fatalities usually involving drunken revellers wandering through graveyards at night.

Not to be outdone, the American’s developed coffin torpedoes. After the Civil War there was a rise in the number of anatomy schools in the US and this brought with it an increase in grave robbing. In 1878 Mr P Clover of Columbus Ohio developed a shortened gun to fit under the coffin lid which would be primed to fire in the face of anyone foolish enough to desecrate the grave. Just curious, but I wonder how many of these are still lurking in US cemeteries to this day…best to tread carefully I would say!

The Anatomy Act 1832 – how the poor paid the price

Burke and Hare were by far the most notorious resurrectionists, the Edinburgh based duo decided that all that digging was far to much like hard work and instead they murdered their victims (Hare was allegedly in Newcastle in 1828 and may just have had a hand in setting up the cross-country cadaver network uncovered at the Turf Hotel[5]). Their trial in 1828 created such outrage that a Parliamentary Select Committee was set up to look into legally increasing the supply of corpses to anatomy schools.

After a few amendments the new Anatomy Act 1832 was passed and the problem appeared to be resolved, resurrectionists were officially out of a job and anatomy schools had to be licenced. Section 7 changed the law to allow that anyone lawfully in possession of a corpse could permit it to undergo anatomical examination providing no relatives objected; while section 16 abolished the requirement for bodies of criminals to be dissected. All good and well you might think, but the Act was open to abuse.

What the changes to the law meant in practice was that unscrupulous work house owners and even hospitals could make a ‘killing’ out of their inmates (and they had ways of ensuring that circumstances did not allow for any relatives to raise objections). Some medical schools went as far as too hang around outside workhouses like vultures if they even had a whiff that an inmate was feeling a bit peaky and there were cases of hosptials burying patients then buying their bodies back for dissection. I think that Ruth Richardson neatly sums up the impact of the Act on the poor in her book ‘Death, Dissection and the Destitute’

“What had for generations been a feared and hated punishment for murder became one for poverty.” [6]

The Act paved the way for anatomy schools to make significant advances in medicine however it should not be forgotten that the heaviest price for these advances was ultimately paid, as always, by the poorest in society.

As a child I used to love stories about cats: Jeffy the Burglar’s Cat, Gobollino the Witches Cat, Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats – basically if it had a cat in it I would read it.

My all time favourite was the trilogy of stories by Barbara Sleigh charting the adventures of a little girl called Rosemary Brown and the witches cat Carbonel. I loved these books because they revealed a whole night-time kingdom ruled by cats that coexisting alongside, but unobserved by the humans in their humdrum daylight world. Plus, it also explained the purpose of those big colourful jars of liquids often seen in the windows of chemists shops: a prescription from one jar allowed you to understand the language of animals, from the other vice versa (I can’t tell you how much of my childhood was spent plotting how to get hold of some!)

The King o’ the Cats

Little did I know that the Carbonel tales were based on the British folk tale about the King of the Cats. The tale exists in several forms in England, Scotland and Ireland.

The tale usually features an individual who is ordered by an animal or a disembodied voice to tell ‘A’ that ‘B’ is dead (and they usually both have weird names such as Dildrum Doldrum etc). The individual then retells his tale to his friends or family and finds out that ‘A’ is in fact his pet cat (or other animal). The recipient of the news then disappears never to be seen again.

The story is a folk narrative – which Kevin Crossley-Holland describes as a tale of enchantment placing magic alongside the mundane; and in which folk beliefs may be expressed but within an entirely fictional context. The listener is not supposed to believe that the events actually happened. (p333). For those of a technical turn of mind, DL Ashliman in his ‘Death of an Underground person’ article on http://www.pitt.edu classifies the story as:

“Death of an elf (or cat)” tales are classified as type 113A tales in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther folktale classification system, or as a migratory legend type 6070B in the Christiansen system”

King of the Cats, image by John D Batten

Cats, especially black cats, feature strongly in folk-lore and superstition (and are still considered lucky in England) and the idea that your homely moggie might in fact be more that he or she seems is very appealing; the death of a cat is, as noted by Ashliman, also often linked to elves and fairies in the folk tradition. In short cats are magical creatures.

The idea of the King of the Cats appears in many traditions. In Ireland the Imtheacht na Triomahaimhe has a king or lord of cats, and books by Lady Jane Wilde, WB Yeats and Padraic Colum all included tales of feline royalty.

Dating the tale

In the 16th Century the phrase ‘King of the Cats’ was used by Shakespeare in Romeo and Juliet, suggesting that it was a well-known phrase (although Wikipedia notes Shakespeare was probably not referring to the folk tale itself). A horror ‘novel’ from 1561 called ‘Beware the Cat’ may be influenced by the folk tale – it depicts a secret world of talking cats (I wonder if Barbara Sleigh was influenced by this as well….?)

The first recorded version of the tale appears to be from the late eighteenth century and appears in a letter written by Thomas Lyttelton in 1782. The story seems to have existed in oral tradition prior to this, as Walter Scott was familiar with the story as a child. Once written down the story seems to have spread to more a more literary audience including Percy Bysshe Shelley, then to folklore collectors such as Joseph Jacobs and Charlotte S Burne.

During the nineteenth century there was a growing sense that the oral folk tradition should be recorded before it was lost in the wake of the Industrial Revolution and growing urbanisation. Little did those early folklorists suspect that were there is folk there are invariably tales; and if the abundance of contemporary (Urban) legends is anything to go by folk traditions are going strong even in the digital age!

Joseph Jacobs

Joseph Jacobs (1854 -1916) was a folklorist and historian who published numerous collections of folk-tales: Indian, Celtic and English as well as collections of fairy tales; and edited the journal Folklore from 1899-1900. Born in Australia, he studied at Cambridge and lived in England for many years before finally settling in America. Despite his ‘outsider’ status (he never made it into the ‘in crowd’ of British Folklorists) he was inspired by the ‘romantic nationalism’ of the day. He wanted to collect distinctly English folk-lore/fairy tales that English children could read – as distinct from the European tales they were more familiar with through the works of Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

Jacobs included ‘The King of the Cats’ in his 1894 book ‘More English Fairy Tales’ and in his notes he freely admits that this is his own version based on up to 5 variants of the tale (which he lists) rather than a verbatim account from original sources and this allows him to incorporate all of the best elements of these tales.

So, this may not be the ‘purest’ version of the King of the Cats, but I think it is one of the most appealing from a literary perspective. Heck, it even features a grave-digging sexton (sextons: such stalwarts of folk tales!)

Here then, is Joseph Jacobs entertaining retelling of the British Folktale ‘The King of the Cats’. Enjoy…

One winter’s evening the sexton’s wife was sitting by the fireside with her big black cat, Old Tom, on the other side, both half asleep and waiting for the master to come home. They waited and they waited, but still he didn’t come, till at last he came rushing in, calling out, “Who’s Tommy Tildrum?” in such a wild way that both his wife and his cat stared at him to know what was the matter.

“Why, what’s the matter?” said his wife, “and why do you want to know who Tommy Tildrum is?”

“Oh, I’ve had such an adventure. I was digging away at old Mr. Fordyce’s grave when I suppose I must have dropped asleep, and only woke up by hearing a cat’s _Miaou_.”

“_Miaou!_” said Old Tom in answer.

“Yes, just like that! So I looked over the edge of the grave, and what do you think I saw?”

“Now, how can I tell?” said the sexton’s wife.

“Why, nine black cats all like our friend Tom here, all with a white spot on their chestesses. And what do you think they were carrying? Why, a small coffin covered with a black velvet pall, and on the pall was a small coronet all of gold, and at every third step they took they cried all together, _Miaou_–”

“_Miaou!_” said Old Tom again.

“Yes, just like that!” said the Sexton; “and as they came nearer and nearer to me I could see them more distinctly, because their eyes shone out with a sort of green light. Well, they all came towards me, eight of them carrying the coffin, and the biggest cat of all walking in front for all the world like–but look at our Tom, how he’s looking at me. You’d think he knew all I was saying.”

“Go on, go on,” said his wife; “never mind Old Tom.”

“Well, as I was a-saying, they came towards me slowly and solemnly, and at every third step crying all together, _Miaou!_–”

“_Miaou!_” said Old Tom again.

“Yes, just like that, till they came and stood right opposite Mr. Fordyce’s grave, where I was, when they all stood still and looked straight at me. I did feel queer, that I did! But look at Old Tom; he’s looking at me just like they did.”

“Go on, go on,” said his wife; “never mind Old Tom.”

“Where was I? Oh, they all stood still looking at me, when the one that wasn’t carrying the coffin came forward and, staring straight at me, said to me–yes, I tell ‘ee, _said_ to me, with a squeaky voice, ‘Tell Tom Tildrum that Tim Toldrum’s dead,’ and that’s why I asked you if you knew who Tom Tildrum was, for how can I tell Tom Tildrum Tim Toldrum’s dead if I don’t know who Tom Tildrum is?”

“Look at Old Tom, look at Old Tom!” screamed his wife.

And well he might look, for Tom was swelling and Tom was staring, and at last Tom shrieked out, “What–old Tim dead! then I’m the King o’ the Cats!” and rushed up the chimney and was never more seen.